Introduction

You cannot please everyone! We try to please as many people as possible with our articles but there is no denying that we just cannot please everyone. A common comment that pops up in our articles is why are we using an Athlon X2-3800+? We don't use it because it's all that AMD gave us but because we went and purchased multiple processors for our testing labs and the X2 3800+ was the best bang for buck.

Today we are going to compare the FX-60 and X2 3800+ against each other. We know now that the FX-60 is going to be the faster processor but what we want to have a look at how much extra performance we get, from such an expensive processor. We are going to be purely looking at graphics card performance and why you might ask? The answer to that is easy, because 90% of the time when we test a high-end card, the complaints attack these articles as to why we are using a $300 processor on a $1200 graphics card setup.

Thanks to our good friends at Gigabyte here in Australia, we have got ourselves an FX-60 and a pair of GeForce 7900GTX cards. We had a look at performance of the 7900GTX's on the FX-60 the other day in an article and we were impressed.

The Basic Differences

We are not going to look at the processors in depth or anything but just a simple look at what the basic differences are between each CPU:

Price: FX-60 comes in at a massive $1011 while the X2 3800+ costs a more respectable $295.

Speed: FX-60 and X2 3800+ are both Dual Core processors. The FX-60 is clocked at 2.6GHz and the X2 3800+ is clocked at 2GHz.

Cache: The amount of cache impacts prices of processors and as expected the FX-60 has more with 2MB included while the X2 3800+ only has 1MB.

Apart from these three main differences, the processors use the same technology like SSE, SSE 2 and SSE3 along with 3DNOW! technology.

Let's have a look at our test setup and get straight into the benchmarks.